Best Laid Plans (10 page)

“I thought you said you just fed her.” There was something vaguely accusing in his tone, and suddenly he wasn’t as attractive as he’d been a moment ago.

“I did.”

“Well, she’s hungry again.”

“Maybe she’s just crying because her nose is stuffed up, did you consider that?” She reached for Daisy, and grabbed her from Jake so roughly she cried even louder. “Shh, shh, it’s alright. Mommy will suction your nose.”

“I just
did
that. Why don’t you try feeding her again?” He hoisted his backpack, which had been hanging from one of the kitchen chairs. “I have to check in with my brother, but you can call me on my cell if you need to.”

He was out of there so fast he never even heard her retort. Not that he could have, over the sound of Daisy wailing. “Believe me, I won’t
need
you,” she said to the closed door.

As soon as she settled in the rocker and lifted her shirt, Daisy clamped on to her nipple and started sucking. “Well, I guess you
were
hungry.” What disturbed her more than Jake being right was that the baby had nursed just as long as usual at the earlier feeding. She’d been restless, turning away frequently, but Violet had blamed it on her cold.

After only a minute or so of frantic sucking, Daisy spit out the nipple and began to howl again, tears streaming down her red, angry face. Violet realized then that she hadn’t felt her milk let down. Maybe because of the stress of the past week, or the supplemental bottles they’d given Daisy, it appeared that her milk had dried up. But it didn’t matter why, she thought, what mattered was that she could no longer feed her child, the most elemental task of motherhood. Her body really
had
betrayed her.

Tears sliding down her face as well, she reached for the phone on the table beside her and pressed “1" on speed dial. Her call was answered on the second ring, by the only person whose voice she wanted to hear at that moment.

“Mom? Can you come to Boston — today?”

• • •

When Jake arrived at his brother’s penthouse, he wasn’t sure he should use his key, or even if it would work. Pamela had probably had the locks changed and switched the décor to Country Cottage by now.

“Hello?” he called, his voice lost in the vast space.

“Back here.” Jamie was in his home office, standing over a sheaf of blueprints on his architect’s desk. “I wondered when the prodigal brother was going to show up.”

“Sorry about that. I just had to … ”

“Go. I know. It’s what you do. What you’ve always done.” His eyes were hard to read behind his stylish black-framed glasses, but Jake heard resignation in his voice, and acceptance. “Have you been in touch with Uncle Matt?”

Calling Uncle Matt had been at the top of his list, until Violet lost her nanny. “No, why?”

Jamie ran his hand through his hair, which was the same dark blonde color as Jake’s but longer and curlier. “He fell on a job a couple days ago, got a concussion and broke his leg. He’s going to be out on disability for six weeks, at least.”

“Whew, that’s going to be hard for him to take.” His uncle bragged, with annoying frequency, that he hadn’t missed a day of work since he was sixteen. “At least he has Darlene to help him.” Or was it Darla? It was hard to keep track of Matt’s women — a family trait.

His brother laughed. “
Donna
moved out a few months after you left for the last trip. She said he was impossible to live with. A nurse is going to check on him every few days, but otherwise he’s on his own.”

“I don’t have any plans the rest of the weekend.” Unless Violet called him, of course, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen. He hadn’t liked treating her so coldly, but felt it was necessary — for both their sakes. “I’ll drive to Wickham to see how he’s doing. But I came over to explain about what happened the other day.”

The click-clack of high heels on the wooden floors told him he and Jamie weren’t alone in the apartment after all.

“Jamie? Our appointment’s in half an hour.” Pamela was checking her watch as she entered the room. She appeared surprised to see Jake, although he knew she must have heard the two men talking before she came in. “Jake! How nice to see you again.”

He nodded and forced his lips into something she might consider a smile.

Jamie rolled up the blueprints. “We’re going to pick out new carpeting for the master bedroom.” Jake expected eye-rolling, but his brother seemed enthusiastic. “But stick around and we’ll all have dinner together. You have something important to tell us, right?”

Jake shrugged. “It can wait. I’d better stay at Uncle Matt’s tonight.”

• • •

“Where have you been, boy? Holed up with some woman, no doubt.” His strong and powerful uncle crammed into a wheelchair, with his leg in a mammoth cast extended straight in front of him, was an arresting sight.

“
Two
women. But how was I supposed to know you would fall off a roof?”

“Ha! I could believe your brother was with two women, but not you. And I didn’t fall off a roof. As you well know, I have the balance of a mountain goat.” Although he’d managed to open the door for Jake, Matt was having difficulty maneuvering the chair from the entryway back to the living room.

“Let me give you a hand.” His uncle glared at him, so Jake backed away and waited for him to jockey the chair into the right angle to make it through the narrow doorway. Once he was back in the living room, which was uncharacteristically strewn with books, newspapers, and even clothes, he picked up the cable remote and began channel surfing, pointedly ignoring Jake.

“Uncle Matt? How did you get hurt?”

The big man curled his lip like a baby. Like Daisy had after he suctioned her nose, in fact. “I was watching my client walk back to her car. She has the most amazing ass I’ve ever seen, Jake, I swear. And I … ” The rest was garbled.

“I’m sorry?”

“I stepped into the basement we’d just excavated, like some stupid cartoon character!”

Jake’s first impulse was to laugh at the image, but he was smart enough to stifle it. “I guess you made quite an impression on your client.”

“She drove away in her Mercedes before anyone knew what happened. At least I’m thankful for that.”

“Maybe you should be thankful your men hadn’t poured the cement yet.”

Matt’s mouth fell open, and then he began to laugh. Jake joined in after a beat, and they kept it up in wave after wave until their eyes watered and his uncle started to cough.

“Didn’t even occur to me,” he wheezed.

“Let me get you something to drink. A beer? I’m spending the weekend, and I plan to knock back a few myself.” Some American vices didn’t seem so bad anymore.

Jake headed for the kitchen, but when his uncle got his breath back he tried to stop him. “I haven’t had a chance to get things cleaned up. I didn’t know you were coming.”

“Just relax. I’m here to help.” Except he hadn’t expected his normally fastidious uncle’s kitchen would look like a tornado had come through and emptied his cupboards and refrigerator. It was a good thing they didn’t need glasses for their beer. He filled the sink with hot soapy water and dumped the crustiest dishes and pans in to soak.

“Did you have a falling out with Jamie?” Uncle Matt asked when he brought him his beer. “Because you can stay here while you finish work on your books.”

Jake wasn’t sure if the offer was for his benefit or Matt’s. It was obvious his uncle was going to need some help, and Jake could work in Wickham and drive in to Boston when he needed. But there was his visitation with Daisy on Saturdays, which he’d already decided wasn’t going to be enough.

He shook his head and stared at his beer bottle as if it had all the answers.
Just say it
. He took a deep breath. “Here’s the thing, Uncle Matt. I’ve got a kid in Boston.”

“Did you know I had a concussion? Because I just thought you said you had a
kid
, Jake.” Matt’s expression was two parts confusion and one part shock.

“You heard right. I have a baby girl named Daisy, and it’s your fault.”

His uncle killed the television from the remote and turned his wheelchair to face Jake straight on. “You’ve blamed a lot of things on me over the years, but I think you’ll have a tough time making this charge stick.”

“You introduced me to her mother, last year at about this time.”

Just when Jake thought he was going to have to spell it out, Matt’s face lit up with the pleasure of solving a riddle. “Violet Gallagher! I knew she had a baby, but I never thought …” He whistled, which made his old retriever, Rex, stagger in from the back porch and blink at them with rheumy eyes. “She’s a real beauty, and a sweet girl, too. There was a time I considered asking her out myself. But how come you never told us about the baby?”

Jake slammed his beer down on the end table next to his chair. He might understand now why Violet had kept the baby a secret, but he hadn’t forgiven her.

“I didn’t know. I’m not proud of it, but what happened between us was meant to be a one-night stand. How could it be anything else? I was leaving for Russia the next day. So when she found out she was pregnant, she decided she could do it on her own. I had to figure it out for myself when I got home.”

“No, no, no. This single-mother stuff is no good! Amanda, your poor mother, struggled so much after my brother died. Then she married that creep Ellsworth, probably just so she wouldn’t have to do it all alone.” He rubbed his eyes with his fists, as though he wanted to erase the vile memories. “But you know now, Jake, so what are you going to do about it?”

Jake opened and closed his mouth. Leave it to Uncle Matt to ask the hard questions. “Now I’m going to … wash your dishes.” He escaped to the kitchen, leaving Matt mumbling and swearing as he tried to follow in the uncooperative chair.

“Rex, get back to the porch before I run you over with this contraption!”

By the time his uncle made it to the kitchen, Jake was up to his elbows in soapy water. He was in hot water, it turned out, in more ways than one.

“Jake, I asked you a question.” His uncle’s voice was soft, in the ominous way he and Jamie knew was far more serious than if he bellowed at them.

“You think I should make an honest woman of her? When your own bedroom has a revolving door?”

Jake felt his uncle’s piercing glare without turning around. “I never fathered a child.”

He didn’t dare remind his uncle, but he usually followed that statement with
as far as I know
. “I intend to be a father to my child, as much as I’m able to with my work and to the extent Violet allows. As for Violet, I can’t force myself on her.”

“You’re sure she doesn’t want you?”

“We spent one night together. We don’t even know each other.” To be honest, he felt like he knew her much better after last night. Taking care of their sick baby together felt more intimate than the act that had created her.

“When do men and women ever really know each other? Do you think your mother knew Ellsworth?”

Jake’s fists clenched in the dishwater. Although his logic was skewed, damn Uncle Matt for making him think about George Ellsworth, the man who’d knocked his mother around, then abandoned her when her cancer was diagnosed. He would have as little say about who came into Violet’s life as his dead father had had, and about an equal ability to protect her. Richard Rayburn might be with Violet right at this moment, attempting to insinuate himself into her life permanently. He supposed he should be grateful; the man seemed harmless enough. But he wasn’t grateful, not at all. Violet — and Daisy — deserved better. There was only one way to ensure they got it, and that way was impossible. For several reasons.

“What are my wife and child supposed to do while I’m in Nairobi or Bhutan for months at a time? I have to make a living.” He handed his uncle a dish towel.

Matt shook his head in apparent disgust and wheeled closer to the stack of washed dishes. “Your cameras work here in the States, don’t they? Here in Massachusetts?”

The very idea of
staying home
made Jake’s throat start to close up.

“I have a contract with my publisher. A legal document, Uncle Matt.”

The other man sighed. “Jake, I raised you to do the right thing. The right thing and the legal thing are not always the same.”

He drained the sink and began to fill it again, wondering how his uncle had managed to use so many dishes in the short time since his accident. In the silence that followed, he heard loud and clear the things his uncle wasn’t saying, the things he never said.

When his mother died, George Ellsworth, the man who had left her to die with only her young sons to care for her, became their legal guardian. But Matt, their father’s much younger brother and a complete stranger to them, had come to their rescue. It hadn’t taken much for him to convince Ellsworth to step aside, once the man knew there was no inheritance to leech. Although it was unremarkable to him at the time, Jake often reflected these days on the most significant aspect of the story. Matt was only twenty-one years old at the time.

Whatever his plans might have been, they were abandoned to raise and support two emotionally scarred hellions who never showed, as Matt himself might have said but didn’t, a lick of gratitude. There was no revolving door on Matt’s bedroom in those days, and now, although Jake supposed it wasn’t too late, he had no wife or children of his own. He had no idea if his uncle had ever wanted those things. Until now.

“You have a child, Jake, and she has a beautiful, sweet, smart mother. You’ve got what? Three months before you have to figure out what to do about your job? Get out of here and go after your family!”

• • •

By Sunday afternoon, Violet had accepted that she was finished with breastfeeding. According to what she read on the Internet, it was possible to restore her milk, but it was more work than she felt herself capable of at the moment. Daisy had no nanny, and her mother had to leave in a couple of hours.

“I’m sorry, Violet, but the cruise to the Greek Isles won’t wait for me,” Sandra poured a cup of the special blend tea she’d brought with her into one of Violet’s best antique China cups. It was a scene straight out of her childhood — her mother bustling about the kitchen in a worn pair of jeans and a man’s white shirt, while Violet sat at the table, having a snack and describing her day. The only difference was Daisy’s presence, her soft breathing coming through the baby monitor on the counter while she napped upstairs.